What is the pulse of your business?

In a recent trip out of town, I found myself forced to face an ugly truth. I was beginning to let all the negativity in the news move my subconscious mind away from living on the positive side.

As a cancer survivor, I can tell you thinking negatively is bad for your body.

As a business owner, the key to the success of my business, and anybody else’s too, is what attitude we set for everybody who works with us. Just like our personal body, a negative attitude in our business is also BAD for our business. If we have a great attitude, surprise, others seem to have one, too. It’s quite contagious. (Warning: A negative attitude is equally contagious).

So, reality check time. What is the “pulse of your business” measured by looking at your employees attitude? If they aren’t wildly enthusiastic about doing their work, which leads to happy customers and more sales, then look in your mirror. What is your attitude like? Are you leading by example? Are you working at building a positive atmosphere in your business? Yes! It does require you to work at it. If you don’t, the natural result will be a negative atmosphere.

This weekend, we are celebrating the birth of the greatest nation on earth! It all started with disliking an overabundance of ... wait ... here it comes ... taxes! Our founding fathers were inspired to risk everything (and most of them lost everything in the process) to give us a future with so many things to be thankful for and positive about. But darn it! They didn’t get rid of all those pesky taxes! Oh well, it still turned out pretty good anyway, don’t you think?

We may by nature dislike taxes, but did you know our nation is almost 90 percent voluntarily compliant in paying our taxes? That beats just about every other nation on earth! We do a pretty darn good job of voluntarily paying what we owe. Just like most folks stopping at a stop sign even when nobody else is around, it seems to be part of what makes us Americans. We voluntarily do what is right, even at sometimes great personal cost. That is something to shout from the rooftops and be positive about! For all its problems, we still have a great country full of mostly great people.

So, let’s celebrate our nation’s birth with a positive attitude. Choosing to focus on the good instead of the bad. Just don’t lose one attitude we inherited from those founding fathers; it’s a good thing to hate taxes ... with a positive attitude of course!

Did you hear? “If you don’t learn to laugh at trouble, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you’re old.”

Kelly Bullis is a Certified Public Accountant in Carson City. Contact him at 882-4459. On the web at BullisAndCo.com and also on Facebook.